Deportation violence unleashed early in the Great Depression and overseen by the Secretary of Labor Doak, former official in the A.F. of L.

‘Dollar Imperialism Means Deportation for 100,000 Workers’ by J. Louis Engdahl from The Daily Worker. Vol. 8 No. 20. January 22, 1931.

IN its desperate efforts to overcome what Wall Street’s “Commercial and Financial Chronicle” of January 3 calls, “The most dismal year in the mercantile and financial history of the United States,” the Washington government announces immediate plans for the deportation of 100,000 aliens. This is the spearhead of the attack against militant labor inspired by the notorious Fish Committee of the United States Congress that has secretly developed its own “political police” for spying out foreign-born workers active in the growingly desperate struggles of the American working class.

The announcement of the wholesale deportations constituted the first public declaration of the new secretary of labor in the Hoover cabinet, William Doak, formerly legislative representative or “lobbyist” of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.

Doak Just Like Davis

The Hoover administration, driven frantic by the results of the November elections, and the growing crisis, put forward Doak as the successor to James J. Davis, the Pittsburgh steel baron, banker and mine owner, as an effort to hoodwink labor. Doak, the official of the railroad train-men already proves himself in action to be of the same fascist breed as the Pittsburgh multi-millionaire, who for years paraded as “secretary of labor” while leading in the campaign for the registration, finger-printing and deportation of foreign-born workers. Davis has now been promoted and became senator from Pennsylvania, where workers rot in prisons, serving up to five year sentences, for struggling against the steel and coal Interests.

During the year 1931 the deportation program will be quickly extended, since Secretary of Labor Doak informs the United States Senate that “it would appear a fair estimate that there are 400,000 aliens illegally in the United States. The 100,000 are deportable under existing laws. The congress now in session plans to strengthen these laws, with the special objective of reaching every foreign-born worker affiliated with a working class organization. It is the special ambition of the Fish Committee that has the endorsement of Secretary of Labor Doak. To drive every foreign-born member of the Communist Party and the Trade Union Unity League with its affiliated revolutionary trade unions out of the country.

Deportations by Wholesale

During the year 1930, there were 16,631 deportations for all causes. Needless to say those were practically all workers. Last August there was the wholesale deportation of 6,500 jobless Mexicans, who had been sweated in the Southwestern states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, until they were needed no longer. Then they were herded back across the Rio Grande to old Mexico, to become victims of the economic depression in this Wall Street colony.

In 1930, deportations that will be duplicated many times in 1931, included workers from the Oriental countries of China and Japan, as well as Latin-American countries, in addition to Europeans. Ellis Island, the prison for aliens in the shadow of the so-called “Statue of Liberty” in New’ York Harbor is always crowded with an endless stream of exiles. At frequent intervals a “deportation special,” an “alien prison train” crosses the nation from Seattle to New York with its human cargo of deportable “undesirables.”

Recently, such a train carried 1,150 victims. In order to speed up this process the Secretary of Labor Doak, asks congress for power to authorize his police agents over the land to sign warrants of arrest. This means that foreign-born strike leaders, all foreign-born workers active in unemployment demonstrations or hunger marches, in fact foreign born workers active in any working class activities, may be picked up on sight, thrown into prison, and started on their way out of the country before help can reach them from the International Labor Defense American section of the International Red Aid.)

For Right of Asylum

It is difficult to tell just how many workers have already been deported in this manner. While fighting for the right of political asylum in the United States, the International Labor Defense struggles through every resources to save workers already doomed by Dollar Imperialism to death at the hands of the bloody fascisms of Italy, Jugo-Slavia, Hungary, China, Spain, Venezuela and many other centers of black reaction. Denial of jury trial, secret hearings, framed-up evidence, deliberately falsified translations of testimony given by prisoners in foreign languages, these are sonic of the methods used to secure quick deportations of “undesirable aliens.”

It is exactly in this period that labor in the United States on an increasing scale, irrespective of color or nationality, native and foreign-born, Negro and white, unite for the struggle against deportations, for the right of political asylum, against lynchings, for the right of legal existence of revolutionary class organizations, for amnesty for all class war prisoners.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1931/v08-n020-NY-jan-22-1931-DW-LOC.pdf